The Detention Center
Mills County Jail
- Operated byMills County Sheriff's Office
- Jail address600 Industrial Road, Glenwood, IA 51534
- Jail phone712-527-4275
- VisitationRegular visitation on Thursdays each week, 15 minutes per visit; attorneys, clergy and medical professionals may visit at any time; visitors are subject to search and a conservative dress code
- Inmate contactInmates have daily outgoing phone access and cannot receive incoming calls; messages by voicemail to 712-800-0887; texting and video calls are available
- Money and commissaryRouted to the jailatm.com vendor — 'To put money on an inmate's account for money or commissary items, you can go to www.jailatm.com'. No rate schedule is published on the county site.
- Room and boardThe sheriff's page links a 'Mills County Sheriff's Office Payment Plan' form hosted on an outside form service (cognitoforms.com), indicating room-and-board charges, but no rate appears on the county's own domain
- Jail chain of commandThe county's Detention Officer job description says the post 'REPORTS TO: Detention Lead, Jail Administrator, and Sheriff' — but no person is named to the Jail Administrator post in the county's own directory, so jail_administrator is left null and the elected sheriff is recorded as the jailer
- What was triedThe county's Sheriff page, sheriff staff directory, both FAQ views, the Detention Officer job description and the Board of Supervisors agenda of March 4, 2025 were all opened. None publishes a roster, bed count, population, bail instructions, inspection report, boarding contract or fee schedule.
Source: Mills County — Sheriff's Office and Mills County Jail FAQs · checked 2026-09-18
Transparency rating
1/10Closed- ✓The jail is named
- ✗Who is in custody — not published
- ✗Beds and daily population — not published
- ✗What it costs taxpayers — not published
- ✗Deaths in custody — not published
- ✗PREA audits — not published
- ✗Independent inspection — not published
- ✗Who else it holds, and for how much — not published
- ✗How to post bond — not published
- ✗Phone, video and commissary rates — not published
The Building
You paid for it. Here is what the record says it cost.
- Year builtNot found
- Original costNot found
- Paid for byNot found
- BedsNot found
Since then
- Not found
The Sheriff
Sheriff Greg Schultz
- Runs the jailYes — the county's own sheriff page says the sheriff oversees administration of the county jail; Iowa Code 356.2 gives the sheriff charge and custody of the prisoners in the county jail
- How the office is filledElected county-wide to a four-year term (Iowa Code 331.651); on a vacancy the first deputy assumes the office
- Chief DeputyJosh England
- Office600 Industrial Road, Glenwood, IA 51534; 712-527-4871; open Monday–Friday 7:30 am to 4:00 pm
- Detention budget requested vs. approved, by year
- Jail staffing levels and vacancy rate
- Lawsuits and settlements involving the jail
Source: Mills County — Sheriff's Office staff directory · checked 2026-09-18
The Judges
In Iowa the official who sets bail at first appearance is a magistrate, and magistrates are appointed, not elected: Iowa Code 602.6501 places a magistrate appointing commission in each county — one district judge, three members appointed by the county board of supervisors, and two attorneys elected by the county's attorneys — and Iowa Code 602.6403 has that commission appoint the county's magistrates to four-year terms. District judges are merit-selected under Iowa Code ch. 46: a district judicial nominating commission sends the governor two nominees, the governor appoints one, and the judge then faces a yes/no retention election and a six-year term. Iowa holds no contested judicial elections. The three supervisor appointees on the magistrate appointing commission are the only voter-accountable link in how the bail-setting officer got the job. No Mills County magistrate or district judge was named from a source opened in this session.
Iowa District Court (serving Mills County) — judicial district not verified from a source opened in this session
- Not found
Magistrate (sets bail at initial appearance, Iowa Code 804.22)
- Not found
- The county's bond schedule
- Share of the jail population held pretrial
- Median time from booking to first appearance
Source: the state judiciary · checked 2026-09-18
The County Commissioners
They pay for the jail. The sheriff runs it.
- What they controlThe detention budget, the building itself, and the agreements that let other agencies rent its beds.
- What they don'tDay-to-day operations. The sheriff is separately elected and answers to voters, not to the board.
- The boardBoard of County Commissioners
- Where the jail money is decidedAgendas and minutes →
Notes on the record
- Mills County names its jail plainly — 'Mills County Jail' is the county's own FAQ category heading and the facility name used in its Detention Officer job description — and gives its address and phone. What it does not publish is any number: no bed count, no population, no detention budget line, no boarding rate.
- The county publishes practical jail information (visitation day and length, mail rules, how to reach an inmate, how to deposit money) but nothing about posting bail, so bond_info is 'no'.
- Fees are routed off-site without rates: commissary and inmate account deposits go to jailatm.com, and a room-and-board payment plan is collected through a cognitoforms.com form. Neither the amounts charged nor the phone or video-visit rates appear on the county's own domain, so fees is 'no'. Commercial and vendor sites are not treated as the county publishing.
- The Detention Officer job description shows a Jail Administrator post exists in the chain of command, but the county's own staff directory names no one to it, so jail_administrator is null and the elected sheriff is recorded as the jailer under Iowa Code 356.2.
- Jail inspection: Iowa inspects every jail every year but the state does not publish the report. Iowa Code 356.43 requires the Iowa Department of Corrections and its inspectors to make periodic inspections of every jail and municipal holding facility, and Iowa Admin. Code 201—50.3 requires the chief jail inspector to visit and inspect each jail within the state at least annually, with 201—50.2(3) allowing those visits to be unannounced and requiring jail staff to produce all books, records, medical records, data, documents and accounts. Iowa Code 356.43(4) then routes the report to only four places — the IDOC director, the sheriff or police chief, the local governing body, and the county attorney. Nothing requires anyone to post it, and doc.iowa.gov has no jail-inspections section. Mills County does not publish its copy on its own domain.
- Iowa has no public statewide dataset of deaths in county custody. Iowa Admin. Code 201—50.22(14) requires the state jail inspection unit to be notified within 24 hours of any death, attempted suicide, fire, escape, injury to staff or prisoners from assaults, or use of force and prisoner self-injuries, and Iowa Code 127.3(1) requires an autopsy for a death in a jail or under police custody where no natural disease process accounts for it. Neither produces a published number.
- Iowa Code 356.49 requires every sheriff to file a monthly written report with the IDOC director giving the number of men, women and juveniles held. No evidence was found that IDOC publishes those counts, so capacity and population can pass only from the county's own figures.
- Iowa's open-records right is Iowa Code ch. 22; 22.2 gives every person the right to examine and copy a public record. There is no blanket response deadline — the only clock is 22.8(4), which caps a delay taken to screen a record for confidentiality at twenty calendar days and says it ordinarily should not exceed ten business days.
- Board of Supervisors. The agenda of the regular meeting of March 4, 2025 lists three supervisors by surname — Supervisor Mayberry, Supervisor Sayers and Supervisor Crouch. First names were not obtainable from a page opened in this session.
These three offices decide who sits in a cell in Mills County and what it costs the people who live here. Nationally, almost 77% of the people who died in local jails in 2019 had not been convicted of anything, and suicide was the leading single cause of those deaths (Bureau of Justice Statistics, Mortality in Local Jails, 2000–2019).
How much is your sheriff — and your judge — costing you?
Your VOTE is POWERFUL.
The sheriff who runs this jail is elected. So are the commissioners who pay for it.
Names verified 2026-09-18 · dollars and outcomes still being gathered